


Burning Altars

by sarensen



Series: To the cold and the nebulous [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Choking, Classic Kylux, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Obsession, Semi-Public Sex, Violent Sex, unhealthy relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-09-12 21:25:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9091369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/sarensen
Summary: And here they suddenly are, shaking and tender and wrong.





	1. Chapter 1

Ben’s first lesson with Snoke is this: There is no death.

He’s fifteen, all awkward limbs and wretchedness, and he’ll grow into one but never the other.

Snoke says: “They live on in the Force.”

But all Ben feels is their blood, seeping through his soft boots and in between his toes. Warm. Wet.

Twilight paints the sky in broad uneven strokes of orange and purple, crickets sing the day to sleep, and when the stars start the broad arc of their climb towards dawn, still he stands among them, among their bodies, feeling their dead eyes upon him.

When he can move again he lifts his padawan’s braid, hands shaking as he brings the static sibilant hiss of the lightsaber to his face. Fine black hairs drift gently down, clinging to the blood-splattered faces at his feet, to their greying lips and clotted eyelashes.

They lay at his feet, and the Force whispers to him of the inevitability of entropy.

Snoke says: “This will make you powerful.”

Ben tosses the severed braid to the ground. He exhales the last shuddering gasp of his old identity, and inhales, and fills himself with the beginnings of the new. There is no death, he repeats to himself, over and over again, avoiding the gaze of the dead.

There is no death.

 

\--------

 

Hux’s first lesson with his father is this: Everything will burn.

He’s nine, and looks up and _up_ at Brendol’s face, hidden in shadow, and trembles at the sound of his voice. He’s weak, small, an unwelcome stain on the Hux family legacy.

His father says: “Don’t look back.”

Hux’s hand is tiny in the commandant’s rough, calloused palm. Rain saturates his hair, trickles into his face. He keeps his eyes on his father, on the broad back and black coat, undulating behind him in the wind. Wet cobblestones slip beneath his shoes, his hurried clacking steps echoing around the corners of the old stone buildings of their courtyard. The world is shades of shifting grey, dripping around the edges, and everything smells like dead leaves. It's so cold.

He doesn’t look back.

Behind them, the keening voice of the woman who is no longer his mother pleads, “Don’t go.”

His father’s hand tightens around his like a vice, lifting him up by the arm and bundling him into the back seat of an old transport, waiting just outside the tall, rusted gates. Hux doesn’t look back.

His father says: “You are a child of the Empire, now.”

And his words paint pictures of massive orbiting Star Destroyers, of a thousand troops in neatly stacked rows of white, of black flags bearing proud symbols like a sea of masts covering every planet. But Hux sees the ruins of the AT-AT half buried outside the city. He sees Empire flags in tatters, burning, and hears the voice of his father, drunk on rage and despair, calling out for orders that never come. The Empire has fallen, and Brendol fell with it, and never quite got back up again.

The transport vibrates to life, engines flaring, and bears them away from Arkanis, from the old mansion with the cobblestone courtyard and rusted steel gates, and still Hux does not look back.

Instead he looks at his hand, clasped inside the cage of his father’s fingers, and pulls it free.

If everything is to burn, then by god, he will start the fire.


	2. Chapter 2

Snoke calls it a purge. Absolving an entire religion of its sins by the act of complete annihilation. One by one, the remaining Jedi are felled by Snoke’s avarice, victims of extenuation.

Find. Destroy. Repeat.

Kylo is twenty-four with a brand new lightsaber and a brand new title, both scraped together from the ashes of Darth Vader’s legacy.

Snoke says: “Their power will become yours. They live on in the Force.”

So he searches and kills, becomes stronger, better, and with every death his life loses a little colour. He sinks into the grey sameness of every mission, every day; slips easily under the endless glassy surface of predestination dulled by the monotony of repetition.

And this dim-grey existence metered by dark blooms of dripping red becomes a well-worn habit, his way of being, and he settles into it with the tired and aching resignation of a life, a destiny that could have been - but isn't.

And then he gets assigned to the Finalizer.

And then he meets Hux.

Hux is shimmering hues of russet-copper-gold, his mind a glimmering, neon nexus of thoughts and strategies and _need_ and emotion. He hemorrhages color like blood and Kylo’s first instinct is to _take_ , to possess this blinding iridescence for himself, an urge he manages to suppress only through extreme effort of will.

And in the deep and quiet lull of his darkest nights, when Snoke’s manipulation bleeds up and spills all over Kylo’s walls like a writhing, crawling swarm of black flies, he closes his eyes and saturates himself with the memory of Hux, dousing himself in his brilliant colors like paint.

Hux dominates his thoughts like the sun at the center of a star system. He _burns_ with it and with the passing monochrome days-weeks-months of Kylo’s increasingly malcontent existence, his quiet preoccupation with Hux slowly turns into obsession.

 

\--------

 

For Hux, Kylo Ren is a lesson in inevitability. He recoils, sharply, from the size of him, the heady thrum of power that trails in his wake like a second cloak. He turns from the sharpness in his eyes and seethes at the brilliance of him, finds the precise black-and-white lines of his logic blurred by the ambivalence of him.

Kylo becomes a bruise on the certitude of Hux’s conviction and he finds himself stripped suddenly bare under his constant scrutiny, the weight of his gaze crawling over the back of Hux’s neck and settling with a feeling of dread at the bottom of his spine: the sibilant whisper of doubt dripping into the deepest reaches of his mind to sit, always, at the back of his head, alien and discordant.

But Snoke says: “We need him.”

And his words drip with the echoes of victory and dominance, but Hux finds only resentment in the way Kylo speaks to him, only ever seeking to undermine him in the eyes of their leader. They collide and tear apart with cosmic magnitude, destructive and ruinous. And more often than not it's the echoes of Hux’s rage that bear Kylo from the Finalizer, the clamor of his presence fading back into structured normalcy like the surface of a lake rippling slowly back into silver calm.

One day, Kylo returns from a mission with a broken arm and a shuttle full of dead Stormtroopers. Hux is thirty-one with a brand new rank and a brand new ship and is wielding his datapad in front of him like a shield. Kylo, who remains unknowable, slouches in a chair. It might be the first time Hux has seen his face. It's unremarkable.

They are alone in one of a hundred black-silver meeting rooms on the Finalizer, and Hux has called Kylo things like ”careless” and “irresponsible”.

He says: “In time, your impulsiveness will cost us the Order. If it were me, I would have--”

“But I'm not you!” Kylo interrupts, shouting. And, softer, “No matter how badly Supreme Leader wants me to be.” He surges up to face him, and Hux, taken aback by the desperation in his voice, the frustration canting his strange, lilting tone, suddenly notices how close he is to Kylo, how heavy they are both breathing.

The silence echoes with words like “please” and “incomplete” and a million other things Kylo has not said and Hux has not understood. Until now.

And if Hux were the kind of person to believe in the Force he might think it whispers to him now, of opportunity and of power.

So he frowns, and says, “Kneel.”

Kylo exhales, a long distant breath that brushes Hux’s cheek, featherlight. Outside, a muffled radio crackles static overlaying a report; Stormtroopers patrolling the corridor.

Slowly, Kylo kneels.

Hux isn't sure why, what new madness has befallen them, but Kylo kneels.

And here they suddenly are, shaking and tender and _wrong_.

Kylo becomes lips pressed warm and soft over skin, hair the texture of fine-spun silk slipping like velvet between his fingers. Hux becomes black downturned lashes brushing an unremarkable face, his name exhaled like a prayer when Kylo pulls back to breathe.

Kylo doesn’t meet his eyes.

Hux doesn’t look away.


	3. Chapter 3

Kylo does not have Hux. He has brief moments of his weakness, shining memories like the shards of multicolored crystals in the dark, few and far between: a gloved palm resting lightly on his cheek, cotton-soft voice in the morning, dripping honey and blood.

He closes his hands like talons around these moments, trying to jealously hoard them in his mind, but they spill through his fingers like bright marbles, shattering on the ground.

One day, Hux is riding him, waist trapped in the cage of Kylo’s big hands, the pale expanse of his stomach denting under Kylo’s thumbs. His thighs flex, lifting him up and dropping him down, so slowly, so sweetly. He has a thoughtful look on his face, the kind that only ever means trouble of the worst sort. A cigarette dangles from his lips, quavering slightly over the words, “What are you looking for, Ren?”

Kylo doesn’t understand.

Hux elaborates, “What is it that you want from me? From this?”

The light catches him from behind, hair haloing a corona of rust around his face. Then his lips twist down into a sneer of understanding. “Redemption? Is that it?”

He scoffs, taking the cigarette from between his lips with two fingers and leaning over to stub it out in the ashtray on the bed next to them. His right hand rests on Kylo’s face and mouth, thumb pressing softly into the black mole on his cheek. His hips grind into a slow rotation that makes Kylo’s whole body shudder.

Kylo wishes he would stop talking.

He doesn’t.

“Pitiful. Chasing absolution between my thighs. _Mine_. As if I could ever love someone like--”  
Kylo’s hand shoots up before he can stop it, closing around Hux’s throat like a vice.

“Shut up,” he says, and curls his fingers _in_ and he can feel the fine cartilage of Hux’s trachea shift beneath his palm and he’s squeezing too hard, can’t seem to stop and isn’t sure he wants to anyway, and as he lies there holding the tremble of Hux’s heart in his palm, it occurs to him that Hux does not have the Force, that everything he is and ever will be for a long suspended instant lies only in the curling crush of Kylo’s fingers.

Then Hux shouts, a broken and strangled gasp of a sound; comes all over Kylo’s stomach, eyes squeezed tightly shut under a scrunched brow and he arches backwards into a half-moon of pleasure and as Kylo lets go of him, releases his beautiful russet-copper-gold creature into the freedom of breath, of life, he thinks, _Snoke was wrong_.

 

\--------

 

Hux waits until Kylo falls asleep, until his eyelids stop fluttering and the searing heat of his body simmers into a gentle kind of mellow warmth, lining the skin of Hux’s shoulder and hip and thigh. He waits until the bow of his upper lip curves out into an expression of stillness, of peace, or as close to it as Kylo Ren will ever get.

Then he carefully, slowly shifts out of bed, goes to the refresher and stops in front of the mirror. He lifts a trembling hand to rest his fingertips against the turned down corners of his reflection’s mouth and stares at the color of its irises, stares at them until his heart pounds so hard it threatens to break his chest; until the mirror-world around his eyes turns black and fades into nothing and the knuckles of his other hand turn white where they clutch the rim of the basin. And he breathes, and breathes, until the sound of his ragged breaths fills the room with the violence in his chest.

He stays there until the lights automatically engage for first shift, until he hears the soft rustle of sheets from inside and, in a while, the soft tread of boots.

The door hisses softly open, and then shut, and Hux is alone.


	4. Chapter 4

It's raining on Starkiller Base and Hux is asleep, both of which are rare enough occurrences to be notable. Light trickles around dark rivulets of water interrupting the dusty glow of the moon in the window, spearing occasional shafts of white through a mass of tumultuous cloud.

Kylo lies awake, watching as he always does in the black nights of Snoke's influence. He's not sure how many hours have passed.

In his mind, Snoke whispers: "You must take what you want."

But Kylo, who has only ever had things taken from him, remains weak in the face of Hux's fleeting moments of compassion.

It's been one week since the completion of the Starkiller project, and against his ribs Hux dreams of conquest and ruin. One shoulder blade etches the sharp curve of a shadow into the white of his back, angular and oblique. A violence of freckles flares down over his arm like a rash, warm to the touch and to the tongue until they dissolve into pale skin and the sharp point of a crooked elbow. Kylo rests the very tips of his fingers here, then presses down, denting the skin into white straining half moons that slowly saturate with color when he pulls away; a temporary mark of possession.

In a very short time, Hux has become the lingering taste of smoke in Kylo's mouth, the voice that chases him into dreams, violent red seeping around the grey edges of his world. Hux has become the negative space that defines him, and Kylo, framed by his brilliance, feels faded; a sediment of excess color.

The Force swirls darkly around Hux as it always does, reeking of imminent death, and yet the weapon lies dormant. Hux spends all of his time here now, on this planet that is now more steel than earth, and yet Starkiller Base lies quiet and cold. This has been bothering Kylo. He's not sure why.

The sheets whisper as Hux shifts under Kylo's arm, tilting his head back slightly to say, "I can feel you watching me."

Kylo says, "I'm always watching you."

Hux turns around against him, his voice treacling. "And what have you learned."

(Kylo aches with the tenderness of it. Goosebumps pebble on his arm under Hux's warm breath.)

_You_ , he wants to say, _Now. Here. These soft unguarded moments of you_.

Instead, he says, "You're afraid."

Hux goes still, then untangles himself from Kylo to lean up on one elbow and scowl at him.

Kylo watches the shadows of water trails in the window smear dark streaks over Hux's face, and murmurs, "You're scared what this will make you. What you will become if you fire the weapon." He wonders if he is right.

Hux reaches over to cup his cheek with the same hand that left bruises like dark paint on Kylo's collarbone and hips and between his ribs. He smiles, baring too many teeth, and says, "The Galaxy crawls with the dregs of the New Republic. They spread across the stars like a disease: the foul and the corrupt, the profiteering and the tainted. Their lies of peace and freedom lay waste to the poor and the wretched, while they rot in the comfort of their complacency. But no more. I will tear open the very stars and bathe every single rotten world in their cleansing fire, and they will _all_ burn."

And for the first time Kylo realizes that he loves him, the intensity and violence of him, the quiet contained brutality.

Hux says, "No, Ren," and curls his forefinger under Kylo's chin, "I'm not scared of what I will become if I fire the weapon. _You_ are."

 

\--------

 

It's the middle of sixth shift and the Finalizer runs a skeleton crew, staffed by sleepless soldiers that wander the halls to the rhythm of the steady breathing of a thousand souls lost to the surreal wavering shapes and sibilant whispering voices of the dream world.

It's quiet in the polished, black halls of the ship, in her angular corridors and before her darkened control consoles, cold and dead and still but for a soft sudden gasp that breaks the silence.

Hux fits into the space between Kylo's breaths, pressed so tight against the wall he aches with it. They huddle just around the corner of a narrow maintenance hallway close to the command bridge, and Kylo's cock is buried so deep inside Hux he lifts off the ground with every thrust. His hands scrabble over smooth durasteel, gloved fingertips slipping into narrow cracks. His cheek aches with the cold and the violence of being forced against the wall.

He hisses, "Harder." Kylo's mask bumps the back of his head, making his hat slip down over his eyes. He pants, "Harder, _fuck_."

Tomorrow, Hux will fire Starkiller Base and burn the Galaxy to the ground. Tonight, Kylo's belt chafes into his lower back, the hard muscles of one huge thigh pinning his leg at an angle that hurts.

And if anyone were to walk past their darkened hiding place right then they might hear Kylo growl; "Come for me."

And Hux, who holds the death of worlds in his palm but remains ever powerless against the low vibrating thrum of Kylo's voice against his back, does, long ropes of white that drip shamefully down gunmetal grey, smearing into the jodhpurs he'd shoved to the ground.

The bones of the ship groan and shudder and Kylo gasps his name, and then it's over, and strong hands twist him around and shove him back against the wall. Warm come trickles down his thigh. Kylo's gaze behind the mask is tangible, dragging over Hux's body like crushed glass.

Kylo says: "Look at you. So desperate. So filled with need. Shame looks good on you."

And he's right, about all of it. Hux spits in his face anyway, a long, clear trail dripping over the curve of the black mask.

Kylo presses forward and Hux shies away from him, shrinks in on himself but there is no running from this, no hiding from this power like poisonous black ink, oozing oil-slick between the bright synapses and neural pathways of his mind and staining their luminous blue like dark paint. Kylo latches onto his will, sinks barbed claws of the Force into it and tells Hux, "You love me".

And all Hux's power and all his self-enforced frigidity could have never prepared him for how _good_ it feels to surrender to Kylo like this, to abandon his fear and his tight control to the heavy, cloying press of Kylo's mind. In the broken silver reflection of his face in Kylo's mask he sees his pupils dilate, the ink of the Force bleeding into his eyes until they are all black and no green.

He says: "Yes. I think I do."


	5. Chapter 5

That night, Kylo has the dream again.

It ends with the weight of a lightsaber hilt, the constant pushpull-quiver of its blade and its spitting, hissing growl, echoing in the emptiness. With Snoke, watching from somewhere in the dark. With resignation, with slowly-bleeding color; a desaturation to shades of grey and black.

The Force whispers to him: "You were not meant for this."

Or maybe it's the voice of Han Solo, echoing from the depths with reproach. 

Hux kneels before him at his end, an ellipses after fists and teeth and nails and discarded blasters, and the way his hand trembles when he wipes his palm over his mouth and the way blood trickles from the corner of his lips - these things are part of the end of their story, the final ragged gasps of a thing severed at the head, all bone and marrow.

Hux breathes heavily, crystal rivulets of sweat trickling over his cheek, so pale in the dim light. (And this is Kylo's Hux, the one that belongs only to him, a constantly moving messy kinetic echo of the cold and perfect General who stands before the First Order, all ice and stone.)

Hux looks up at him through strands of copper and says: "Who's going to love you when I'm gone?"

It takes surprisingly little effort: A quick thrust forward. A dull thud as the blade pierces Hux's chest. A heavy resistant drag as it slides between his ribs. A wet tearing sound as it exits his back.

Hux exhales, sharply.

Kylo braces one hand against his shoulder and pulls the blade free and Hux slumps forward onto the cool black tiles, and goes still. Blood pools around Kylo's bare feet, warm, wet, seeping between his toes

and

he wakes, shaking and disoriented, next to Hux; rears up and tears the bandages off his face, but the room remains dark, half of Hux shrouded in shadow. Kylo puts his face in his hands and breathes, and breathes, and breathes, and slowly, his heart stops aching and his lungs stop burning and he feels less like he might throw up.

Beside him, Hux wakes enough to say: "Be still. I'm trying to sleep."

So Kylo lies down again, faces Hux, and saturates himself with his colors until the dream curls into the nether like smoke, touches Hux's hair (still here) and traces the fine blue veins trickling over his pale eyelids (still real) and rests the pads of his fingers on Hux's lightly parted lips, damp with sleep (still his).

Hux's breath stings the open wound on Kylo's cheek and his arm is too heavy on the wound in Kylo's side. It's too warm under the heavy winter blankets, cloyed with pain and slowly-dissipating fear. Kylo drifts off to sleep again, eventually, with the fingers of one hand buried in Hux's hair.

(Still here. Still real. Still his.)

He does not dream again.

Kylo's last lesson with Hux is this: there is no death. 

 

\--------

 

Hux's last lesson with Kylo is this: everything will burn.

"This has to end." He says it like a mantra, an incantation, again and again.

Kylo repeats, "No," and pounds the wall next to Hux's head with his fist, frowning, "Why."

Hux says: "Snoke has summoned you. Starkiller is dead." 

(He does not say: "There is nothing here for you anymore.")

Kylo crowds him against the wall, too hot and too big and too close and Hux feels like he can't breathe, stifled under his gaze, one eye white and the other burning black. He tries to push him away. It doesn't work.

Kylo stares at him, and stares, face naked and intense without the mask, jaw working, and when he finally seems to assemble the words in his head he growls, "I have seen stars collapse into blazing supernovae and they were _pale_ in comparison to you."

Hux swallows dryly; puts one gloved palm on Kylo's face, covering the raised angry edges of the wound and the milky white of his ruined eye. He says, softly: "How would you know? You're half blind."

Kylo bares his teeth, feral. His rage shakes the walls of the ship and shakes Hux's bones and seizes his chest, but he doesn't back down, stares into the vortex of Kylo's fury and digs his fingers into his cheek. And Kylo, who remains ever uncertain in the face of Hux's reserve, falters, and eventually the heavy compressing weight of the Force disperses. Hux gasps into the void and fills his lungs with the smell of Kylo; fills his mouth with the taste of him, so close. Blood drips from the fingers of his glove.

Kylo says, "I never wanted this." It's an apology, or perhaps a plea, and it echoes with an imperceptible trace of sound in the back of Hux's head: _look at what I've become for you_.

Later, Kylo bends him over the small desk in his quarters, shoves into him too hard, too fast, wrenches his arm painfully behind him, pulls his hair. He hooks his elbow around Hux's throat and _squeezes_ and he does not say "it would be so easy to break you", but Hux thinks he hears it anyway, or maybe he just tells himself he wants to.

Because this is all he has left. Misfortune and disaster were the catalysts of his metamorphosis into this, into unimportance, into worthlessness, but this, here, now, the burn of it and the intense and profound love pouring out of Kylo even now, after everything; these are things that still belong to him.

And if this is all they ever have, then Hux will let it ignite him, and burn one last time.

Afterwards, Kylo slumps in the chair, one big hand covering the side of his face, covering the blood. He's breathing hard. His hair is a mess. His breeches are tangled around his boots.

Hux scrapes the ashes of his dignity together and slowly gets to his feet. He pulls his jodhpurs up, buckles the belt under his tunic. He bends as far as he can, fetches his hat from the ground and fits it over his hair.

And when he leaves, he doesn't look back. The door hisses softly shut behind him, and Hux walks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I requested a moodboard for this piece from the amazing [stardestroyervigilance on tumblr](https://stardestroyervigilance.tumblr.com/post/160899592908/hi-happy-birthday-in-advance-d-and-thanks-for):

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on [tumblr](http://sarensen.tumblr.com/).


End file.
